CFD of Multiphase Flow in High pressure Trickle Bed Reactors: Porous Media Concept

A two-phase Eulerian model, based on porous media concept, describing the flow domain as porous region is presented to estimate the hydrodynamics of two-phase flow in trickle-bed reactors (TBRs) operating at high pressures. The drag forces between phases have been accounted by employing the relative permeability concept (Sàez and Carbonell, 1985). The model has been validated with the different sets experimental data obtained from different independent sources. All the comparisons lead to the fact that the model functions arguably well in predicting the experimental data for high pressure operations. The developed model is very much flexible unlike the traditional CFD approach, i.e. three-phase Eulerian simulations for different particle size effect incorporation without much complexity. While simulating for high pressure condition, we have applied the recently developed correlations (Nemec and Levec, 2005) for relative permeabilities.